You have drastically misunderstood what you saw. This isn't an error in doclifter, it's a result of a basic ontological mismatch between the source and target markups that doclifter tries to bridge across. There are no line breaks in DocBook's XML, structure-oriented world. The closest thing to one ia special-purpose <sbr/> tag that is only valid inside command synoposes. Thus there is no "line break" equivalent that .br can be mapped to. Nor should there be; that is fundamentally a presentation-level concept. Thus, one of either ignoring the .br or interpreting it as a paragraph boundary is exactly what doclifter *should* be doing. This is not a bug, it is correct behavior because those are the only alternatives XML-DocBook supports.